Klaviyo and Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) are two of the most popular email marketing platforms, but they serve meaningfully different audiences. Klaviyo has positioned itself as the email and SMS platform purpose-built for ecommerce. Brevo has positioned itself as an affordable, all-in-one marketing platform for businesses of all types. Comparing them directly requires understanding these different starting points, because the right choice depends less on abstract feature comparisons and more on what kind of business you are running.
Having implemented and managed both platforms across dozens of ecommerce brands, I can say with confidence that neither is universally superior. Klaviyo is exceptional for ecommerce brands that want deep data integration, sophisticated segmentation, and revenue-focused automation. Brevo is excellent for businesses that need reliable email marketing, basic automation, and a suite of communication tools at a significantly lower cost. The nuance matters, and most comparison articles gloss over it.
This article covers pricing, ecommerce integration, segmentation, automation, deliverability, and practical usability for UK brands. The goal is to give you enough honest detail to make a confident decision for your specific situation — not to declare a winner in the abstract.
How these platforms are positioned
Klaviyo was built from the ground up for ecommerce. Its entire product philosophy centres on using customer purchase data to drive more revenue through email and SMS. The platform's core strength is its deep integration with ecommerce platforms — particularly Shopify — which allows it to ingest real-time browsing, cart, and purchase data and use that data to power highly targeted automation and segmentation. Klaviyo thinks in terms of customer lifetime value, predicted next order dates, and revenue per recipient.
Brevo was built as a general-purpose marketing platform. It started as an email marketing tool (under the Sendinblue name) and has expanded into a broader suite covering email campaigns, SMS, WhatsApp messaging, live chat, CRM, meetings scheduling, and transactional email. Brevo serves ecommerce businesses, SaaS companies, agencies, nonprofits, and any business that needs to communicate with customers across multiple channels. Its core strength is breadth of functionality at an accessible price point.
This positioning difference is not a minor branding distinction — it fundamentally shapes the user experience. Klaviyo's dashboard greets you with revenue attribution data. Brevo's dashboard shows you sending volume and contact growth. Klaviyo's segmentation options include "predicted gender" and "expected date of next order." Brevo's segmentation options include "contact list membership" and "email engagement." Both are valid approaches, but they reflect very different priorities.
Pricing and value
Pricing is where the biggest practical difference shows up, and it is also where the comparison gets complicated because Klaviyo and Brevo use fundamentally different pricing models.
Klaviyo's pricing model
Klaviyo charges based on the number of active profiles (contacts) in your account:
- Free plan: up to 250 active profiles, 500 email sends per month
- Email plan: from $20/month for 251-500 profiles, scaling with list size
- Email + SMS plan: from $35/month, including SMS credits
The critical detail is how quickly Klaviyo's costs scale. At 1,000 profiles, you are paying around $30/month. At 10,000 profiles, approximately $150/month. At 50,000 profiles, roughly $720/month. At 100,000 profiles, around $1,380/month. These are substantial costs, and they increase regardless of how many emails you actually send. A dormant contact counts the same as an active buyer.
This pricing model incentivises good list hygiene — you are motivated to suppress unengaged contacts and keep your active list lean. But it also means your email marketing costs are directly tied to your audience size, which can be challenging for brands with large lists but tight margins.
Brevo's pricing model
Brevo charges based on the number of emails sent, not the number of contacts stored:
- Free plan: unlimited contacts, 300 emails per day (approximately 9,000 per month)
- Starter: from $9/month for 5,000 emails per month
- Business: from $18/month for 5,000 emails per month (adds automation, A/B testing, advanced statistics)
- Enterprise: custom pricing for high-volume senders
At 50,000 emails per month on the Business plan, Brevo costs approximately $49/month. At 150,000 emails per month, roughly $129/month. This is a fraction of what Klaviyo charges for a similarly sized operation. The savings become dramatic at scale — a brand with 100,000 contacts sending two campaigns per week could easily save £800-1,000 per month on Brevo compared to Klaviyo.
The value question
The price difference is real and significant, but it does not exist in a vacuum. Klaviyo's higher cost reflects its deeper ecommerce integration, more sophisticated segmentation, and better revenue attribution. Many brands find that Klaviyo's tools help them generate substantially more revenue per email, which more than offsets the higher platform cost. The question is not just "which is cheaper?" but "which delivers better return on investment?" — and the answer depends on your ability to use the more advanced features. For a broader look at email platform economics, our guide to the best Shopify email marketing apps covers the full landscape.
Ecommerce integration
This is the single most consequential difference between the two platforms for online sellers.
Klaviyo's ecommerce integration
Klaviyo's integration with Shopify is best-in-class. It syncs in real time:
- Full order history and order status
- Product catalogue with images, prices, and variants
- Customer browsing behaviour (pages viewed, products viewed)
- Cart contents and abandoned cart events
- Customer lifetime value and purchase frequency
- Predicted next order date and churn risk
- Product catalogue feeds for dynamic email content
This data feeds directly into segmentation, automation triggers, and email personalisation. You can segment by "customers who bought product X but not product Y," "customers whose predicted next order date is within seven days," or "high-value customers who have not purchased in 90 days." These segments update automatically in real time as new data flows in from Shopify.
Klaviyo also supports WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, and other platforms, though the Shopify integration is the deepest and most feature-rich.
Brevo's ecommerce integration
Brevo integrates with Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, PrestaShop, and other platforms. The integration syncs contact data, order history, and basic product information. It supports abandoned cart tracking and order confirmation emails.
However, the depth of the integration is noticeably shallower than Klaviyo's. Brevo does not provide the same level of real-time behavioural tracking, predictive analytics, or dynamic product content capabilities. The segmentation options based on ecommerce data are more limited — you can segment by purchase history and order value, but the granularity of Klaviyo's ecommerce-specific segments is not matched.
For a brand where email marketing is a primary revenue driver and the ability to send highly personalised, behaviour-triggered emails is critical, Klaviyo's integration depth is a genuine competitive advantage. For a brand where email is one channel among many and basic ecommerce data is sufficient, Brevo's integration covers the essentials. For more on what effective Klaviyo email marketing looks like in practice, our service page covers the strategic approach.
Segmentation and data
Klaviyo's segmentation
Segmentation is where Klaviyo genuinely excels. The platform allows you to create segments based on an extensive range of conditions:
- Purchase behaviour (specific products, categories, frequency, recency, value)
- Email engagement (opens, clicks, specific campaigns, engagement trends over time)
- Website behaviour (pages viewed, products viewed, time on site)
- Predictive analytics (predicted lifetime value, churn risk, predicted next order date, predicted gender)
- Custom properties (any data you sync or collect through forms)
- Location, device type, and acquisition source
Segments in Klaviyo are dynamic — they update in real time as customers take actions. This means your "high-value customers at risk of churning" segment reflects the current state of your database, not a snapshot from when you created the segment. The practical impact is significant: you can trigger automations based on segment entry and exit, creating responsive marketing that adapts to customer behaviour without manual intervention.
Brevo's segmentation
Brevo supports segmentation based on:
- Contact attributes (location, age, custom fields)
- Email engagement (opens, clicks, unsubscribes)
- Purchase data (if connected to an ecommerce platform)
- List membership and form submission data
- Website events (through the Brevo tracker script)
Brevo's segmentation is functional and covers the most common use cases. You can create segments based on engagement levels, purchase history, and contact attributes. However, the depth and granularity do not match Klaviyo's. There are no predictive analytics, fewer ecommerce-specific conditions, and the segment builder — while competent — lacks the flexibility of Klaviyo's condition logic.
For brands that rely on basic segmentation (engaged versus unengaged, recent buyers versus lapsed, geographic location), Brevo handles this well. For brands that want to segment by predicted lifetime value, product affinity, or purchase cycle timing, Klaviyo is in a different league.
Automation and flows
Klaviyo's automation capabilities
Klaviyo's automation (called "flows") is built around ecommerce events. Pre-built flow templates include:
- Welcome series for new subscribers
- Abandoned cart recovery (with dynamic product content)
- Browse abandonment (triggered by product page views without purchase)
- Post-purchase follow-up (product-specific recommendations)
- Win-back campaigns for lapsed customers
- Cross-sell and upsell based on purchase history
- Sunset flows for unengaged subscribers
- Back-in-stock notifications
- Price drop alerts
Flows support conditional splits based on any segment condition, time delays, A/B testing within flows, and multiple communication channels (email + SMS) within a single flow. The visual flow builder is intuitive and powerful, allowing complex branching logic without technical expertise.
For ecommerce brands, Klaviyo's pre-built flows represent significant time savings. The seven essential Klaviyo flows can be set up within a day and begin generating revenue immediately. For a deeper exploration of cart recovery specifically, our guide to abandoned cart email sequences that convert details the strategy behind effective recovery flows.
Brevo's automation capabilities
Brevo's automation is capable and covers the core use cases:
- Welcome emails and onboarding sequences
- Abandoned cart recovery
- Anniversary and birthday emails
- Lead scoring and nurturing
- Transactional email sequences
- Contact list management automations
The automation builder is visual and straightforward. You can set up triggers based on contact actions, time-based conditions, and data changes. Conditional branches allow different paths based on engagement or attributes. The Business plan includes A/B testing within automations.
Brevo's automation is solid for standard email marketing workflows. Where it falls short compared to Klaviyo is in the depth of ecommerce-specific triggers and the sophistication of conditional logic. Klaviyo can trigger a flow when a customer's predicted lifetime value exceeds a threshold, or when they enter a "high churn risk" segment. Brevo's triggers are more conventional — form submissions, email opens, page visits, and date-based conditions.
Email design and templates
Klaviyo provides a drag-and-drop email editor with a library of pre-built templates oriented towards ecommerce — product announcements, sale promotions, abandoned cart reminders, and post-purchase follow-ups. The editor supports dynamic product blocks that pull in product images, prices, and descriptions directly from your Shopify catalogue. Conditional content blocks can show different content to different segments within a single email. The editor is polished and produces clean, responsive emails.
Brevo also provides a drag-and-drop email editor with a substantial template library covering a wider range of use cases — newsletters, promotions, event invitations, transactional emails, and more. The editor is intuitive and produces good results. Brevo's template library is broader in scope (reflecting its wider audience), but it has fewer ecommerce-specific templates than Klaviyo. Dynamic product content is supported but less seamless than Klaviyo's native catalogue integration.
Both editors produce professional, responsive emails. For most users, the design capabilities are comparable for standard campaigns. Klaviyo's edge appears when you need dynamic, personalised product content within emails — its catalogue integration makes this significantly easier than Brevo's approach.
SMS and additional channels
Klaviyo's SMS
Klaviyo offers integrated SMS marketing alongside email. SMS messages can be included within the same automation flows as emails, creating coordinated multi-channel sequences. SMS supports personalisation using the same customer data available for email. Pricing is credit-based, with costs varying by country — UK SMS messages typically cost around £0.05-0.08 per message.
Brevo's multi-channel capabilities
Brevo offers a broader range of communication channels:
- SMS: Integrated SMS campaigns and automations
- WhatsApp: Business messaging through WhatsApp, which is particularly relevant for UK and European audiences
- Live chat: Website chat widget for real-time customer communication
- Transactional email: A dedicated transactional email service with high deliverability
- CRM: Built-in contact management and sales pipeline
- Meetings: Scheduling tool for booking calls and appointments
Brevo's multi-channel breadth is a genuine advantage for businesses that want a unified marketing and communication platform. Having email, SMS, WhatsApp, live chat, and CRM in a single tool simplifies the tech stack and reduces costs compared to assembling separate tools. For businesses where customer communication spans multiple channels beyond email and SMS, Brevo offers more versatility within a single platform.
Deliverability
Email deliverability — the ability to consistently land in the inbox rather than the spam folder — is a critical factor that often gets overlooked in platform comparisons.
Klaviyo has a strong reputation for deliverability among ecommerce senders. The platform provides a shared IP pool for smaller senders and dedicated IP addresses for higher-volume accounts. Klaviyo's infrastructure is optimised for ecommerce sending patterns (promotional campaigns with high volumes and automation flows with smaller, targeted sends). The platform includes smart sending features that prevent over-contacting recipients, which protects sender reputation.
Brevo also maintains good deliverability standards. The platform offers shared and dedicated IP addresses, with dedicated IPs available on higher-tier plans. Brevo's transactional email infrastructure is particularly strong — the company's roots in transactional email mean their delivery infrastructure is well-established. For marketing email, deliverability is generally good, though some users report that shared IP deliverability can be inconsistent depending on the other senders sharing the pool.
Both platforms support DKIM, SPF, and DMARC authentication. Both provide deliverability monitoring tools. In practice, deliverability depends as much on your own sending practices — list hygiene, engagement-based segmentation, content quality, and sending frequency — as on the platform's infrastructure. Neither platform has a significant deliverability advantage for senders who follow best practices.
Reporting and analytics
Klaviyo provides revenue-centric reporting. Every campaign and flow shows attributed revenue, conversion rates, revenue per recipient, and average order value alongside standard email metrics (open rate, click rate, unsubscribe rate). You can track revenue attribution across your entire email programme, comparing the performance of different flows and campaigns. Predictive analytics provide forward-looking metrics like estimated customer lifetime value and churn probability. For ecommerce brands that treat email as a revenue channel, Klaviyo's reporting directly answers the question "how much money is email making us?"
Brevo provides comprehensive email marketing analytics — open rates, click rates, bounce rates, unsubscribe rates, and heat maps showing where recipients click within emails. Campaign comparison tools allow you to benchmark performance across campaigns. The reporting is clean and informative for understanding email engagement. Ecommerce revenue tracking is available through the Shopify integration, but it is less prominent in the reporting interface than Klaviyo's revenue-first approach.
For businesses that measure email success primarily through revenue attribution and customer lifetime value, Klaviyo's analytics are substantially more useful. For businesses that measure email success through engagement metrics and communication effectiveness, Brevo's analytics are entirely adequate. For a broader perspective on what to track, our guide to ecommerce analytics setup covers the metrics that matter.
Ease of use
Klaviyo has a steeper learning curve than Brevo. The platform's power comes with complexity — the segmentation builder, flow editor, and analytics dashboard all offer significant depth, which requires time to learn. The interface is well-designed and logical, but a first-time user will find more options, more settings, and more concepts to understand than on Brevo. Klaviyo's documentation and onboarding resources are excellent, but the platform rewards users who invest time in learning its capabilities.
Brevo is notably easier to get started with. The interface is cleaner and less cluttered, the setup process is faster, and basic campaigns can be created within minutes of signing up. The automation builder is straightforward, the template editor is intuitive, and the overall experience feels less intimidating for users new to email marketing. Brevo also benefits from having a more generalised interface that does not assume deep ecommerce knowledge.
For teams with dedicated email marketing expertise, Klaviyo's complexity is a feature, not a bug — it provides the tools to create sophisticated, high-performing campaigns. For teams where email marketing is managed alongside many other responsibilities, Brevo's simplicity means campaigns actually get sent rather than languishing in a complex platform nobody has time to learn properly.
UK and GDPR considerations
Data hosting and compliance
Brevo has EU-based data centres and stores European customer data within the EU, which can simplify GDPR compliance for UK businesses. Klaviyo stores data primarily in the US, with data processing agreements and standard contractual clauses in place for GDPR compliance. Both platforms are GDPR-compliant, but Brevo's EU data hosting may be preferable for businesses with strict data residency requirements.
Consent management
Both platforms support double opt-in, consent tracking, and easy unsubscribe mechanisms. Klaviyo's consent management is integrated with its ecommerce data model — you can track consent alongside purchase behaviour. Brevo's consent management is more generalised, covering email, SMS, and WhatsApp consent within a unified framework.
Currency and localisation
Klaviyo supports GBP in revenue reporting and product feeds, making it straightforward for UK brands to track email-attributed revenue in pounds. Brevo's pricing is in euros or dollars, though the platform supports multi-currency operations. For UK-based SEO and marketing teams, Klaviyo's native GBP support in analytics is a practical convenience.
Support and time zones
Klaviyo provides email and chat support with response times that vary by plan. Brevo offers email, chat, and phone support, with phone support available on higher tiers. Both platforms have extensive knowledge bases. For UK businesses, time zone alignment for support queries is worth considering — Brevo's European presence can mean more convenient support hours.
The verdict
Klaviyo and Brevo are both excellent email marketing platforms, but they are optimised for different use cases. The right choice depends on your business model, your budget, and how central email marketing is to your revenue strategy.
Choose Klaviyo if:
- You run an ecommerce brand (especially on Shopify) and email is a primary revenue channel
- You want deep segmentation based on purchase behaviour, browsing data, and predictive analytics
- Revenue attribution and customer lifetime value tracking are important to your strategy
- You need sophisticated automation flows triggered by ecommerce events
- You have the budget and team capacity to use the platform's advanced features
- You are willing to pay more for tools that can generate measurably higher revenue per email
Choose Brevo if:
- Budget is a primary concern and you need to keep email marketing costs low
- You have a large contact list but moderate sending volume
- You need multiple communication channels (email, SMS, WhatsApp, live chat) in one platform
- Your business is not purely ecommerce — you also serve B2B clients, run events, or provide services
- You want a simpler platform that your team can use effectively without specialist training
- EU data hosting is important for your compliance requirements
- Transactional email is a significant part of your communication needs
Consider starting with Brevo and migrating later if:
- You are in the early stages of your ecommerce business and need to manage costs carefully
- Your email list is small and you want to learn email marketing fundamentals before investing in an advanced platform
- You are not yet sure how central email will be to your revenue strategy
For most established ecommerce brands on Shopify with email as a key revenue driver, Klaviyo delivers superior return on investment despite the higher cost. For businesses with tighter budgets, broader communication needs, or simpler email marketing requirements, Brevo provides excellent value and sufficient capability. The decision ultimately comes down to whether you need a specialist ecommerce email tool or a versatile marketing platform — and how much you are willing to invest in the difference. For a broader view of email marketing strategy, our article on retention versus acquisition explores why email matters so much for long-term profitability.
If you are choosing between email platforms or want to get more out of your current setup, get in touch. We work with Klaviyo daily and can give you an honest assessment of whether it is the right investment for your brand — or whether a simpler tool would serve you just as well.